We often represent God to ourselves as being able to draw from non-being a world without sorrows, faults, dangers – a world in which there is no damage, no breakage. This is a conceptual fantasy and makes it impossible to solve the problem of evil.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDINThe earth was probably born by accident; but, in accordance with one of the most general laws of evolution, scarcely had this accident happened than it was immediately made use of and recast into something naturally directed.
More Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes
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Love in all its subtleties is nothing more, and nothing less, than the more or less direct trace marked on the heart of the element by the psychical convergence of the universe upon itself.
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In a way, the whole tangible universe itself is a vast residue, a skeleton of countless lives that have germinated in it and have left it, leaving behind them only a trifling, infinitesimal part of their riches.
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Surely the wake left behind by mankind’s forward march reveals its movement just as clearly as the spray thrown up elsewhere by the prow.
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I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.
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I don’t mean the ironic and disillusioned smile of my grandfather, but the triumphant smile of the person who knows that he will survive, or that at least he will be saved by what seems to be destroying him.
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At the extreme temperature occurring in the stars, matter can only survive in its most dissociated states. Only simple bodies exist on these incandescent stars.
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Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.
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From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science.
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Let man live at a distance from God, and the universe remains neutral or hostile to him. But let man believe in God, and immediately all around him the elements, even the irksome, of the inevitable organize themselves into a friendly whole, ordered to the ultimate success of life.
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Regarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated.
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Being happy is a matter of personal taste.
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In the divine milieu, all the elements of the universe touch each other by that which is most inward and ultimate in them.
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But that external consummation is not given to many: nor is it necessary.
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Certain though I am – and ever more certain – that I must press on in life as though Christ awaited me at the term of the universe, at the same time I feel no special assurance of the existence of Christ. Believing is not seeing. As much as anyone, I imagine, I walk in the shadows of faith.
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What is imponderable in the world is greater than what we can handle.
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN